Co-creating the Future of Public Digital Services with techUK and Civil Service Fast Streamers.

Last week Fujitsu was proud to host one of five technology industry days to support techUK’s “Tech Connect” initiative working with the civil service to spark collaboration and fast track innovation in public sector services.

Launched in partnership with techUK’s Public Services Board and sponsored by Jacky Wright, HM Revenue & Custom’s Director General and Chief Digital and Information Officer, the day was organised as part of a 12 week programme to bringing together twenty third year Digital Data and Technology (DDaT) Fast Streamers with another twenty early tech industry professionals working in teams.

Duncan Tait Fujitsu’s Head of EMEIA, introduced the day as an opportunity to share more about Fujitsu’s approach to responsible business. Aligned to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs he gave an overview of Fujitsu as a net £3b investor in the UK, our focus on Diversity and Inclusion as well as our ambition to eradicate the gender pay gap.

Tim Moody Fujitsu’s Public Sector CTO shared our vision for putting citizens in control of their data based on our work with Estonia (you can read his blog on this here). Drawing on Fujitsu Labs we also heard from Dr David Snelling among others sharing details on Fujitsu Digital Annealer. Government and business are eager to see practical results from artificial intelligence, quantum computing, blockchain, and big data – all areas where Fujitsu is already delivering now.

Our guest speak was from a customer’s strategy team responsible for identifying and analysing the implications of societal and technological change. What useful insight that was to inform the teams by citing real examples of how technology often comes with unexpected and disruptive consequences.

“I found the Fujitsu speakers so interesting, especially the public sector use cases” was how Isobel Richardson, a participant on the programme summed up what she thought was a fantastic day.

Having heard from the multitude of viewpoints the fast streamers were then taken through a Fujitsu Digital Transformation Centre (DTC, of which you can find out more here) workshop in order to apply the theory to solving three real world challenges for government – digitalising transactions where government still requires physical paper based documents from citizens, crowd-sourcing noise data as a proxy for other environmental pollution and digitalising the over-prescribing of drugs which costs the health service £300m / year.

Fujitsu is looking forward to the rest of the programme and the ideas and outcomes generated especially at the competitive presentation which will be attended by senior representatives of techUK, the government, and industry.